Object REXX GTK+ Dialog Manager

This software is subject to the terms of the Common Public License. You must
accept the terms of this license to use this software. Refer to
CPLv1.0.htm for more information.

This package provides an interface from IBM Object REXX to the GTK+ libraries
under Linux. You need some knowledge of the GTK+ APIs in order to fully
utilize the GtkRxDlg package, but simple OREXX/GUI programs can be built
by following the examples provided in the package.

This package is not a GTK+ API tutorial/reference.

Many people have contributed to this effort and I want to thank some of
them here.

GtkRxDlg is NOT a complete GUI interface development environment
for Object REXX. The main problem implementing a complete interface is that
Object REXX does not support callback mechanisms. Callback support is necessary
in order to create interactive responses to window events.

However, this does not mean that Object REXX cannot have a role to play in
the development of GUI applications on Linux. The GTK+ toolkit allows the creation
of dialogs which have builtin responses to events. GtkRxDlg allows the REXX
programmer to build these dialogs, run them, and then query the values of
the widgets in the dialog. This allows the Object REXX program to build and
use a GUI interface to present and request data from the user thus providing
a friendly face to the user.

In order to provide an easy API set to the Object REXX programmer all
access to building and interacting with GTK+ widgets is done through a class
library. The classes and methods in the class library wrap the REXX external
function APIs to the GTK+ libraries providing a level of abstraction to
those functions.

Building GUIs with the GtkRxDlg Object REXX classes is really easy and only
a minimal knowledge of the GTK+ library is needed. The examples provided with
this package should provide enough information for you to build simple
Object REXX GUI applications quickly.

To install the package on Linux, extract the contents into a subdirectory of
your choice. I suggest it be placed into /opt (you may need to be logged on as
root to install it in /opt). Log on as root and run the install.rex
script from the gtkrxdlg subdirectory.

The GtkRxDlg external function shared library
was compiled under Fedora Core 1 Linux using the standard
GCC compiler installed from Fedora Core 1. You may need to
compile your own module for your version of GCC, GTK+ and Linux.

The package was tested using

Object REXX for Linux version 2.3.3

Red Hat Linux version 9 and Fedora Core 1.

All the source files (except makefile.win) are in Unix format
(lines are delimited only by a line feed).